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Fashion

Felix's Favorites

German ski star Felix Neureuther on the new F + I collection and his training programme...

"not what you would expect"

When you look at everything that he’s achieved at such a young age – twelve World Cup wins and four World Championship medals is no small feat – you would think that world-class skier Felix Neureuther would have a bit of an ego. You couldn’t, however, be any further from the truth: In an exclusive interview and photo-shoot with Bogner Fire + Ice, we got to see the side of Felix you don’t see on the race course – a witty, happy, and simply cool guy.

This is the second year in a row that we’ve invited Felix, a Bogner Testimonial Athlete, to come and choose his favourite pieces from the new winter collection: It’s also the second year in a row that Felix has made his selections exclusively from the Fire + Ice range. So who exactly is this pro-skier’s style consultant? “My girlfriend, or my sister,” he admitted. “If one of them tells me that what I’m wearing is a no-go, then it has to go.”

Felix Neureuther

Felix Neureuther

At the photo-shoot, however, it seemed like Felix was doing pretty well without his personal style team. “Sweatpants that look dressy enough to wear to the Bavarian Film Festival, but still feel casual, and a light down jacket – that’s totally me.” With a grin, he added, “they say the older you get, the pickier you get about what you put on your back.”

It goes without saying, then, that Felix looked great for the Fire + Ice photo-shoot, where he demonstrated his personal body-eye coordination training programme: Crossover juggling, which is a form of juggling where you don’t just throw the balls up, but throw them and then cross your arms beneath them before catching them. “Crossover juggling activates all four of the major divisions of the brain,” Felix explains. “I’m more aware of things and react faster to changing ground conditions, and I’m able to process more than one solution to every problem. It opens a lot of doors.”

"Es öffnet viele Türen"

ince starting his unusual training programme, Neureuther has published two books on the topic: One for adults, and one for children. “I’ve been teaching race camps for children for the last eight years, and it’s so much fun,” Felix answered when asked why he wrote a children’s book. “But one thing I noticed is that a lot of kids have concentration problems, and I thought ‘if a teacher devoted two minutes out of forty-five to kinetic exercises for the kids, it would increase the attention spans of the entire class.”

Hopefully, Felix’s programme will help develop a whole new generation of fantastic skiers. For now, we’re excited to see how Felix himself performs in the next season, and hope he looks and feels just as good in his Bogner uniform on the slopes as he did with us on location.